Staff Infrastructure Security Engineer

Ridgeline•Reno, NV

1d•$186,000 - $256,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Ridgeline is seeking an experienced Staff Infrastructure Security Engineer to drive secure-by-default cloud architecture across product areas and set technical direction for securing the company’s cloud environments. The role calls for recognized AWS security expertise and leadership of the security roadmap across cloud security specialties. The engineer will ensure cloud development, deployment, and methodologies comply with industry standards and regulations. The position works closely with Infrastructure and Product organizations. It combines hands-on security engineering with teaching and helping teams adopt a culture in which security is everyone’s responsibility. The engineer will influence architecture across multiple engineering organizations, lead complex cross-functional work, and serve as a primary security representative for their specialty areas.

Requirements

At least 8 years of relevant experience in cloud security or platform engineering, including independently defining and executing complex projects and leading initiatives across multiple teams.
Expert proficiency in at least one programming language; Python is strongly preferred.
Expert AWS experience, including IAM, Organizations and SCPs, Identity Center, VPC, Security Groups, Transit Gateway, Load Balancers, EKS, S3, Aurora, DynamoDB, CloudTrail, and CloudWatch.
Expert knowledge of AWS security and most cloud security specialties, including identity, detection, networking, data security, containers, serverless, and governance.
Demonstrated success designing, implementing, and scaling access-management strategies and policy frameworks such as IAM and SCPs.
Deep understanding of cloud workload protection, infrastructure monitoring, and threat detection in AWS-native environments, including risks that tooling may miss.
Fluency with infrastructure-as-code, such as Terraform, and CI/CD practices.
Experience leading high-impact cloud security incidents as a technical lead or incident commander and driving findings through remediation.
Experience building cloud security platforms, detection pipelines, or posture management at organizational scale, with a track record of reducing false positives.
Experience designing AI-augmented security workflows or lightweight agents and automations, with sound judgment about responsible AI experimentation and data use.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain security tradeoffs to engineers, product partners, and executive stakeholders and influence through technical credibility.
Demonstrated ability to make architectural tradeoffs across services, improve long-term code and system health, and align stakeholders on changes with cross-team impact.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Go, Kotlin, or TypeScript.

Responsibilities

Drive secure-by-default cloud architecture across product areas; threat model infrastructure designs and service adoptions, and define security requirements before systems are built.
Identify cloud security risks that may be missed by tooling, including identity chaining, cross-account lateral movement, control-plane and data-plane separation failures, and supply-chain risks; perform variant analysis to eliminate risk classes.
Design AI-augmented analysis workflows that combine expert review with automated detection to find risks at scale.
Lead high-impact cloud security incidents as technical lead or incident commander.
Assess exploitability, calibrate risk, drive findings through remediation, and build systemic fixes that reduce risk over time; use AI to identify patterns in historical findings.
Own or lead development of cloud security platforms, including AWS guardrails and controls such as SCPs, IAM boundaries, managed security services, custom solutions, and policy-as-code.
Architect AI-powered detection and posture-management pipelines that reduce manual effort while maintaining accuracy and minimizing false positives.
Embed security into CI/CD and infrastructure automation to support reproducible, testable, and auditable deployments.
Lead strategy for access management, least-privilege enforcement, encryption and key management, and runtime protections.
Build and promote frameworks for secure integrations with third-party cloud services and internal tools.
Shape cloud security decisions across engineering organizations and partner with Staff+ engineers and platform teams on design.
Define and execute complex cross-functional projects from planning through production, deliver within deadlines, manage changing expectations, and prioritize work spanning multiple cycles.
Set standards for effective and responsible AI use in cloud security workflows, including responsible experimentation and data use; build lightweight agents and automations.
Take ownership of problems, seek solutions, and communicate clearly.